How will the Earth end?

[Rufus Rhastus J]

Heard this on the radio last night. thought you all may be interested in this so here's the article. Comments?

How the World Will End
28-Nov-2005



In the Guardian, reporter Kate Ravilious asked 10 scientists to name the biggest danger to human life on Earth. Some of them say we'll go out with a bang, others say Earth will have a slow lingering end. Still other scientists say we'll solve our problems by evolving into a new species.
According to British astronomer royal Martin Rees, human beings have only have a 50-50 chance of making it through the 21st century. He thinks our biggest threats, such as global warming, are caused by humans. U.K. researcher Nick Brooks also thinks that climate change is our greatest danger.

Viennese researcher Reinhard Stindl says our species has a pre-destined extinction date, just like the cells in our bodies. He compares this to telomeres, which are the protective caps at the end of our chromosomes. As our cells divide, they never copy their telomeres completely, so they become shorter and shorter as we age. Eventually, this leads to old age diseases such as cancer, Alzheimer's and strokes.

But Stindl thinks that telomeres also get shorter as a species ages, meaning that every species is destined to eventually become extinct.

Health researcher Maria Zambon predicts that a viral pandemic, like bird flu, will be the end of us. In some places, human life has almost been done in by HIV, and SARS illustrated how quickly a dangerous virus can spread through modern transportation.

Terrorism expert Paul Wilkinson thinks a terrorist attack will end the human race, from a nuclear bomb or biological weapon, while defense expert Air Marshal Lord Garden thinks nuclear war will do us in.

NASA's Donald Yeomans thinks we'll go the way of the dinosaurs—that our world will end with a meteorite strike. Bill McGuire thinks a super volcano will explode and cause nuclear winter, which will block the sun and end our growing season. This is what the meteor strike probably did to the dinosaurs. Physicist Nir Shaviv thinks it will be cosmic rays. Robotics expert Hans Moravec thinks we'll build robots so efficient that they'll take over.

Last but not least, physicist Richard Wilson thinks the Earth will be swallowed up by a black hole.

[Dale]

God's will be done.

Only He knows our destiny.

I just hope it's quick and painless.

[Rave]

I think it may be like the last time,a flood,only it won't be water from 40 days and nights of rain,but B/S from constant crap from the media and others,it's getting pretty deep right now.:cheer:

[Chris]

When the world ends, I hope I am not here.

[NRAJOE]

The World will end when the libs finally take control of it all...around 2089...the World will implode from massive stupidity.....

[Gyrene]

"The end of the Earth will be when a Big Rock from space strikes the Earth."
PapaG
"The end of the Earth will be when the Sun flares up, and burns the Earth."
Gyrene

Originally Posted by Rufus Rhastus J

NASA's Donald Yeomans thinks we'll go the way of the dinosaurs—that our world will end with a meteorite strike

The Great Dying
250 million years ago something unknown wiped out most life on our planet. Now scientists are finding buried clues to the mystery inside tiny capsules of cosmic gas.
Listen to this story via streaming audio, a downloadable file, or get help.
January 28, 2002: It was almost the perfect crime.

Some perpetrator -- or perpetrators -- committed murder on a scale unequaled in the history of the world. They left few clues to their identity, and they buried all the evidence under layers and layers of earth.

The case has gone unsolved for years -- 250 million years, that is.
But now the pieces are starting to come together, thanks to a team of NASA-funded sleuths who have found the "fingerprints" of the villain, or at least of one of the accomplices

Somehow, most of the life on Earth perished in a brief moment of geologic time roughly 250 million years ago. Scientists call it the Permian-Triassic extinction or "the Great Dying" -- not to be confused with the better-known Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction that signaled the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Whatever happened during the Permian-Triassic period was much worse: No class of life was spared from the devastation. Trees, plants, lizards, proto-mammals, insects, fish, mollusks, and microbes -- all were nearly wiped out. Roughly 9 in 10 marine species and 7 in 10 land species vanished. Life on our planet almost came to an end.

Scientists have suggested many possible causes for the Great Dying: severe volcanism, a nearby supernova, environmental changes wrought by the formation of a super-continent, the devastating impact of a large asteroid -- or some combination of these. Proving which theory is correct has been difficult. The trail has grown cold over the last quarter billion years; much of the evidence has been destroyed.

"These rocks have been through a lot, geologically speaking, and a lot of times they don't preserve the (extinction) boundary very well," says Luann Becker, a geologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Indeed, there are few 250 million-year-old rocks left on Earth. Most have been recycled by our planet's tectonic activity.

Undaunted, Becker led a NASA-funded science team to sites in Hungary, Japan and China where such rocks still exist and have been exposed. There they found telltale signs of a collision between our planet and an asteroid 6 to 12 km across -- in other words, as big or bigger than Mt. Everest.

Many paleontologists have been skeptical of the theory that an asteroid caused the extinction. Early studies of the fossil record suggested that the die-out happened gradually over millions of years -- not suddenly like an impact event. But as their methods for dating the disappearance of species has improved, estimates of its duration have shrunk from millions of years to between 8,000 and 100,000 years. That's a blink of the eye in geological terms.

"I think paleontologists are now coming full circle and leading the way, saying that the extinction was extremely abrupt," Becker notes. "Life vanished quickly on the scale of geologic time, and it takes something catastrophic to do that."

Such evidence is merely circumstantial -- it doesn't actually prove anything. Becker's evidence, however, is more direct and persuasive:

Deep inside Permian-Triassic rocks, Becker's team found soccer ball-shaped molecules called "fullerenes" (or "buckyballs") with traces of helium and argon gas trapped inside. The fullerenes held an unusual number of 3He and 36Ar atoms -- isotopes that are more common in space than on Earth. Something, like a comet or an asteroid, must have brought the fullerenes to our planet.

Becker's team had previously found such gas-bearing buckyballs in rock layers associated with two known impact events: the 65 million-year-old Cretaceous-Tertiary impact and the 1.8 billion-year-old Sudbury impact crater in Ontario, Canada. They also found fullerenes containing similar gases in some meteorites. Taken together, these clues make a compelling case that a space rock struck the Earth at the time of the Great Dying.

But was an asteroid the killer, or merely an accomplice?
Many scientists believe that life was already struggling when the putative space rock arrived. Our planet was in the throes of severe volcanism. In a region that is now called Siberia, 1.5 million cubic kilometers of lava flowed from an awesome fissure in the crust. (For comparison, Mt. St. Helens unleashed about one cubic kilometer of lava in 1980.) Such an eruption would have scorched vast expanses of land, clouded the atmosphere with dust, and released climate-altering greenhouse gases.

[ash]

ALIENS!!! Thats all i gotta say...
:spaceship ...aliens.

[ash]

The zombies will be the precursor.

[fordruid]

We'll be attacked by Killer Tomato's!

[CleanCut]

By fire.

[Big Dog]

We'll all be buried in trash. So will end the Age of Plastic . . .

[MAX7.62]

The democraps will gain absolute power and Klinton will be leader of the U.N.

[Rufus Rhastus J]

Originally Posted by MAX7.62

The democraps will gain absolute power and Klinton will be leader of the U.N.

that will be the end.:nod:

[Gunnie Ed]

I will end the earth by releasing the great Elder God Cthulu.

[Ctwo]

Ha, the world has already ended.

This is all a figment of your imagination!

[Gio]

It will end if Hitlery Klinton becomes pres.

Originally Posted by Gio

It will end if Hitlery Klinton becomes pres.

she'll be a two term president like her husband

[ash]

Originally Posted by Gunnie Ed

I will end the earth by releasing the great Elder God Cthulu.

Dare ya!

[Outriderdark]

The world will end when I say so. :smash: